


Games we Played

by octovoid128



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: It's really cute if you just read the first part though!, This. Doesn't have a happy ending sorry, a love letter to the toy soldier bc toy soldier i care you very much, mostly just a character study, spoilers for DTTM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:40:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23110351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octovoid128/pseuds/octovoid128
Summary: The Toy Soldier loved games and the Mechanisms always played the funnest and most fascinating ones
Relationships: The Toy Soldier & The Mechanisms, They are. friends....
Comments: 18
Kudos: 110
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	Games we Played

The Toy Soldier loved games. It was in its nature, it supposed, since its primary funtion  _ was _ to be a toy. So they loved playing with their friends. The Mechanisms always played the most interesting games!

Marius’s favorite was the classic rock-paper-scissors, though the Toy Soldier wasn’t sure why exactly. He never seemed to be able to win against it. Even when he remembered to order it to play a specific symbol, he always seemed to forget which one he asked them to play by the time they said “shoot.” Not to mention that he sometimes forgot to watch his inflection on “shoot” which tended to put the game on hold for a while while Marius recovered from the bullet in his heart. He was always up for another round, though, no matter how many times he lost and the Toy Soldier thought it was Jolly Good Fun!

Jonny’s favorite game was hide and seek. The Toy Soldier was an expert hider, though it was sad it never got to be “it.” Jonny was always “it” which never made much sense to the Toy Soldier. Jonny was “he” normally, but he got to be “it” during games and TS was not allowed to be “it” which it thought was rude given that it was “it” most of the time. Oh well. Not to worry. Pretending to be someone else must be part of the fun! TS liked to pretend to be someone named Jessica while it hid.

It could hide from Jonny for  _ years _ , but it also thought it was fun when Jonny found them. Usually this meant a fun trip out the airlock! Which only started a new fun game of finding its way back onto the Aurora so it could hide all over again!

Ivy liked to play chess. The Toy Soldier liked chess too, very much, though it was far more used to being a piece on the board rather than the mastermind behind it. Ivy was good at planning, so she usually won, but sometimes she didn’t calculate the odds correctly, or she’d take a risk that she thought would be in her favor but turned out not to be. She was never a sore loser like some of the others. Instead she’d analyze where she went wrong and ask TS if it could replay the same moves to see if she could change the outcome of the game. The Toy Soldier was always happy to help! They’d play until Ivy won or until she got distracted by one of the other crew members, but TS always enjoyed spending what quiet time it could get playing with Ivy. 

If playing with Ivy was quiet, playing with Tim was quite the opposite. It would start with a bang and suddenly TS would be missing its arm or some other part of itself. Tim’s grin when it turned around was always manic and he would point his gun at them again and shout “Dodge!”

TS would certainly do its best! Tim was quick with his trigger finger but when TS was ordered to do something, it would often take the most drastic measures possible to carry that order out. Usually this game ended with both of them dying multiple times, bits of wood and gore scattered about like confetti. It always reminded the Toy Soldier of the good old days, during the Moon War when it would sometimes end up on the wrong side. And Tim’s aim always did seem a little sharper after these escapades so the Toy Soldier was always happy to help!

Nastya’s game of choice was jenga, which seemed somehow appropriate for an engineer, even if she was more interested in mechanics than structure. Playing jenga with the Mechanisms, though, like just about any other game, isn’t quite the same as an earthling traveling one way through time would expect. No, jenga with Nastya was played in 5D and even though the Toy Soldier rarely had a clear grasp on the laws of physics, it was pretty sure they broke several every time they played. At least one time, its arm had become one of the pieces, and they’re still not sure how that happened. Another time Nastya won by smashing the whole tower down with her violin. The Toy Soldier is not sure how that worked, but it had decided not to question it, since watching Nastya destroy things was just as fun as playing jenga with her. 

The games it played with Brian were about as dangerous as those it played with Tim, though they involved a lot less immediate death and a lot more singing. As two beings who didn’t bleed and experienced pain in a far more abstract way than the others, they were able to play a little bit on the wild side. Whenever the pair were bored, they would each spread their fingers on the table and pull out a knife. TS mostly just enjoyed the singing part, but it was fun to see how long either of them could last without losing an appendage:  
“Ohh, I have all my fingers, the knife goes chop, chop, chop! If I miss the spaces in between, my fingers will come off! And if I hit my fingers, well no blood will come out. Because we don’t have any blood but that’s not what this is about! Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, I’m picking up the speed, and if I hit my fingers well my hand won’t start to bleed!”

“You didn’t really have to change the lyrics, you know, TS.” Brian said, even as he in fact hit his own hand, creating a spark against the metal but not producing any blood.

“But Our Hands  _ Won’t  _ Start To Bleed! I’m Just Trying To Keep It Accurate!”

Brian laughs softly and shakes his head as the Toy Soldier starts the song up again.

Ashes cheated at Yahtzee. The Toy Soldier didn’t know how, but it knew they did. Not that it really minded, since it was all in good fun. And not that it actually knew the rules. It supposed that Ashes must, since they loved dice games. They helped it fill out the little sheet, which was very kind of them.

One time, the Toy Soldier tried to copy them and flip the dice over to new numbers, but it’s pretty sure that actually made its roll worse. Also, Ashes shot it for cheating even though Ashes got to flip their dice all the time. Oh well. It supposed Ashes Must know how the game works better than it. 

After their sheets were tallied and Ashes declared themself the winner once again, they strode off to go set the little sheets on fire. 

“You do know that Ashes doesn’t know the rules to Yahtzee, right?” Jonny raised an eyebrow at it-  _ oh no it had forgotten about hide and seek! _

“Of Course They Know The Rules! They’ve Been Helping Me!” TS insisted as Jonny picked it up to toss it out the airlock once again. Ah, well. Another adventure!

Raphaella liked to play Operation with the Toy Soldier. Not the boring Earth version of Operation, with the strange man with the red nose. No, instead, the Toy Soldier served as the game board. It thinks perhaps it would be quite silly if its nose lit up, especially since it was impossible to effectively remove any of the wood that could be considered its organs without touching the wood around them that could be considered its flesh. Raphaella was getting better at this, however. Ever the one to innovate past the laws of physics! It wasn’t  _ really _ a game, the Toy Soldier supposed, though neither was the game they played with Tim. 

Raphaella would remove its organs in a myriad of ways, peeling the lighter wood of its body away from the red and pink of its heart, its stomach, its lungs. She would see how long it took for the wood to grow back (depended on how they were removed), if the Toy Soldier functioned the same without these organs as it did with them (it did), and whether the wood was a different type than that of its flesh (it was several different types, in fact!)

Maybe it wasn’t really a game, but the Toy Soldier had as much fun being science as it did playing with the other mechs!

*

This is what the Toy Soldier thinks about as it drifts through the void of space, alone for the first time in what can’t really be called its “life.” It had never been alive to begin with. 

The only things it has left on what can’t really be considered its person (it isn’t a person, just a toy with no one left to play with it) are a sheaf of sheet music, now barely legible from years of wear and tear, and the last remnants of its friends: Marius’ black and white cravat, torn and bloodied; one of Jonny’s many belts; one of Ivy’s earrings, though it’s not sure where the matching one ended up; Tim’s goggles; an old, cracked pair of Nastya’s glasses; the flower that used to be on Brian’s hat; Ashes’ lighter; a scrap from the fabric of a pair of Raphaella’s wings. The sheet music, crumpled and faded though it is, is burned into what can’t really be called its mind, especially the notes in the margins. The heavy-handed ink graved onto the paper by an angry Jonny, a stain from Tim’s flask of whiskey, something that was probably blood obscuring Marius’s illegible handwriting, Ivy’s neater writing crammed in the margins as she tried to explain something that would have been easier to explain verbally, a burnt edge courtesy of Ashes, Brian’s crisp X marks to show percussion beats, another stain Raphaella had helpfully labeled as indeed being blood, a little doodle Nastya did of the Aurora saying something rude. 

These are all the Toy Soldier has left of its friends, of the people with whom it had shared games and laughs and fun. What can’t really be called its memory is no match for the vibrant people they were. It doesn’t even have the Aurora to return to. 

So it does the only thing it can think to do, alone and adrift in the endless black. The Toy Soldier finally stops playing. 


End file.
